Cookbooks

I've had this rice pudding recipe on my brain since a September trip to France, during which dinner one night in Paris included a dessert of riz au lait with a salted caramel sauce. Egad, it was amazingly delicious and reminded me of a recipe from many cookbooks ago: Jim Drohman's Gâteau de Riz from his beloved French bistro Le Pichet, which was included in the Best Places Seattle Cookbook I worked on. Seriously, every few days I was ...

A couple weeks ago I had one of those better-than-average work days, which had me hanging out with other food writers at Tom Douglas' cool cooking school Hot Stove Society. Our host was the Washington Beef Commission, and our task to get some hands-on time with various preparation techniques for beef: trussing larger roasts, trimming tenderloin, marinating and grinding. My time at that latter station brought to mind the last time ...

This article posted on Bon Appétit's website yesterday sheds some interesting light on the job of ghost-writing and co-authoring books with chefs and other celebs. It was fun to see a number of friends included in the piece! I've never ghosted a cookbook--contributing to the book's content without direct attribution--but have co-authored a few that are akin to projects mentioned in the article.
I can't agree more about the sentiment that one of the top benefits of working on chef/restaurant ...

In honor of the season and the slew of wild mushrooms beginning to hit markets now, how about a little recipe from my Wild Mushrooms ebook in my Northwest Cookbooks series? I’ve long loved marinated mushrooms, even those pretty basic types that come in little jars from the grocery store. Though like so many favorite snacks like that, it gets only better when ...

It's a funny sensation, that moment in an author's life (at least this author's life) when you realize the book manuscript you've been working on for months is now finished and leaving your grasp for good: off to the printer in whatever form that last round of edits produced. The tweaking of the title, the final review of a few pages. The last minute edits and confirmation of name spellings. Then--'poof'--it's ...

Once upon a time there was this book:
It was, for many years, among the kit of references and tools that students and stagiaires were given upon arrival at La Varenne cooking school in France. In it are the foundational basic recipes that we would be drawing from over the coming months, recipes that would become nearly rote from the frequency at which we reproduced them. But for reference, reminders, and ...

So, first some news. Things have gotten pretty briny around my house, and that's not just because the Puget Sound is a brief stroll from here. I hadn't anticipated that my 2014 would wrap up fully engrossed in oysters, but that's how it played out. By complete coincidence, two Seattle publishers reached out to me about oyster-related projects. The first, an article for Seattle Magazine, appeared in the December issue and covers both the current boom in oyster bars ...

I'm definitely one of those types who learn best by doing. Oh, I did well with book and classroom learning when it really counted through my school years. Since then, though, I've learned far more by just diving into things and developing skills and absorbing knowledge along the way. My rather limited gardening experience comes more from trial and error than careful study. I pick up languages well on-site where they're used, which is so much more engaging than in ...

Between gin, snacks and salmon, it's kind of hard to know which of those favorite topics I touch on more often here. But with the traditional mid May launch of Copper River salmon season just passed, it's little surprise salmon is on top of mind right now. It's something like the swallows back to Capistrano, an event that signifies the general launch of key commercial salmon fishing season throughout ...

It's great when life confirms for you now and then that you are, indeed, hanging out with the right people: folks with similar outlooks on life, priorities in line with your own. I've had some recent examples of that this past week based on conversations about the weather. In someone else's circle, that might mean talk of relishing longer, warmer afternoons for a game of golf, or perhaps chatter turns to ...